Double Your Participants in Your Programs with The Jeopardy Effect!

Are you looking for more people to click, read, and open your messages that promote your programming and latest events?

Have you taken our suggestion to write a blog and are looking for more traffic?

Let’s be honest: it’s tough.

Getting people to open your emails and read about your programs is difficult. (See here for how low the click rates are across various industries.)

NeuroScienceMarketing.com recently highlighted a new study that could help you increase participants in your programs. Researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School revealed that if you use a particular phrase in your headline or subject line, it will double the amount of people who click on your article or link.

We Can Learn From Jeopardy

In short, the Norwegian researchers discovered that what is mandatory on Jeopardy, the long-running TV trivia series in which contestants must phrase their response in the form of a question,also works in attracting clicks to tweets, ad headlines, etc.

Their study shows that writing headlines as a question, almost always led to increased clicks. In some instances, it even raised the click rate by as much as three, four, and even five times. On average, question headlines outperformed declarative headlines by 140 – 150%.

Is There Something Even Better Than Jeopardy?

Researchers found that making a headline or tweet “self-referencing,” i.e., referring to the reader, provided an additional boost to the average click rates.

So, if you used the headline, “You Can Find Love”, for a class on Jewish perspectives on dating and relationships, that would draw more interest and clicks than a declarative version such as, “People Can Find Love”.

Don’t Question Away!

Keep in mind: in the right context, titles such as, “The Top 10 Ways To…” or “7 Habits of Highly Effective Jews” will work better than anything with a question mark.

Make sure that you don’t use questions for every class or event with the hopes that you’ll double your clicks and participants who are interested in your program. After all, any approach to boosting clicks on emails, tweets, article headlines, etc. will become less effective if overused.

So, where should you use question headlines?

The fine folks at NeuroScienceMarketing.com suggest that you should use these techniques, “where they will add some life to a topic, and if you can, further engage the reader with a ‘you’ or ‘your’ in the headline.”